Box Office: 'One Of Them Days' Tops 'Wolf Man' With Promising $12 Million Weekend

Neither film is opening terribly high this MLK weekend, but the domestic debut for Sony's R-rated, star-driven, non-franchis comedy marks the first "Don't give me hope" overperformance of 2025.

This is going to be a weekend where the poor overall grosses compared to what often is a lucrative holiday frame bump up against at least one uncommonly optimistic success story for a respective new release. As regular readers (and listeners) know, I previously didn’t pay much heed to the overall box office regarding weekend cumes, seasonal totals or year-to-year comparisons. In a world where movie theaters were absolute, and the industry was at least going to still exist and function, I was far more concerned with how each respective film performed in relation to budget and expectation.

For example, some in the media clutched their pearls over the extent to which the first quarter of 2011 was down compared to 2010. I noted back then that A) the overperformances of Avatar in late 2009 and Alice in Wonderland in early 2010 skewed that comparison. Moreover, as I wrote way back in April of 2011, if we didn’t want Transformers-level tentpoles every single weekend, then we had to accept that the likes of Insidious, The Lincoln Lawyer, Limitless and Source Code weren’t going to pull grosses on par with the triple whammy of Alice in Wonderland, Clash of the Titans and How to Train Your Dragon.

I still feel that way. The problem is, of course, that A) the theatrical industry has been in extinction-level event peril for nearly five years and B) films like those “just a movie” flicks (aside from the horror movie, natch) stopped being anywhere as much of a casual entertainment option for casual moviegoers in the mid-2010s. Cut to 2025, and they A) barely exist at the theatrical level and B) are not terribly successful when they do. As such,

This weekend has been a miserable one for the MLK holiday, with the lowest-grossing chart-toppers in 29 years. Inflation aside, 12 Monkeys’ second wide-release weekend and the debuts of Don’t Be a Menace to South Central While Drinking Your Juice in the Hood and An Eye for an Eye earned (respectively) $10 million, $8 million and $7 million over the Fri-Sun portion of the 1996 MLK holiday frame. But the actual chart-topper is, of its own accord, a rousing success in terms of budget and expectation.

It is also an uncommonly optimistic debut for the kind of film we all say we want but often don’t show up for. So, I will choose to rejoice that audiences spent MLK weekend showing up to a Barry Jenkins-directed melodrama (Mufasa: The Lion King with a $11.5 million Fri-Sun/$16 million Fri-Mon weekend for a $218 million domestic/$588 million worldwide cume) and an original R-rated comedy starring Keke Palmer and SZA.